State prison officials will release nearly 600 inmates in the next three months, ahead of their scheduled get-out-of-jail date.

The move comes not from a benevolent mood but from the reality of overcrowded prisons (and county jails, which house 873 state prisoners that local jails don't get paid for, but that's another commentary).

State prisons bursting at their seams isn't a new phenomenon. Early releases have been an ongoing stop-gap measure for several years. But such actions simply alleviate a symptom. They don't solve the problem.

One major reason the state's prison population continues to go up and up and up is the way we sentence drug offenders.

One in five inmates in the state's prisons is there because of a drug offense, and that figure will rise, if history tells us anything. In 1970, 1.8 percent of inmates were there because of drug crimes. In 1980, that figure rose to 8.2 percent, and it went to 13.4 percent in 1990 and to 20 percent in 2000. And it's still going up.

Two things about that seem obvious.

One, people who want to use or make or sell drugs are going to use, make and sell drugs. They've said no all right: "No, we won't stop."

Two, if we want to continue to sentence people to jail for long periods of time for using, making or selling drugs, we're gonna have to build a lot more prisons.

However, building prisons usually isn't too high on the public's priority list. It doesn't seem to be too popular with lawmakers, either. Still, something's gonna have to change.

Perhaps sentencing guidelines? Not yet. In the last legislative session, a bill to cut in half the mandatory time served for methamphetamine convictions failed.

But that's what's gonna have to happen. With the state budget as tight as it is, there simply isn't money for enough prison beds. So, society is going to have to make some tough judicial calls. One of them is going to have to focus on drugs.

We're going to have to decide if using an illegal drug is the same as manufacturing it. We're going to have to decide if selling drugs to kids is the same as selling them to adults. We're going to have to decide if any drug crime warrants a prison term more harsh than violent crimes. Until we answer those questions, we, as a society, will continue to release inmates early, and what signal does that action send?

That we talk tough on crime, but we won't put our money where our mouth is, and that we have some weird priorities.